Editor’s Pick: Simulate Large Models Under Nonlinear Response

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

A memorable moment of my youth – or “yute” for fans of My Cousin Vinny– was when Armstrong took his one small step onto the moon for us. My grandfather, born years before the Wright brothers’ flight, was watching it on TV. Snapping out of his dementia, Poppy, a natural engineer with a 6th grade diploma, looked at me with a huge smile and joie de vivre in his eyes I had never seen nor would again and exclaimed, “that guy is on the Moon!” Small steps can be the key to making great things happen.

And many small steps is how NEi Software’s new NEi Explicit can help you make great things happen. The nub of it is that NEi Explicit broadens the NEi Nastran FEA environment with capabilities to simulate extremely large models undergoing highly nonlinear response and large deformations, such as high-speed impacts where the event is measured in milliseconds or less—say, metal stamping or a bird hitting a jet turbine blade. The key to it is that NEi Explicit handles such phenomena with a small-footprint, dynamics algorithm that uses many, small computationally efficient time steps—thousands really—to predict the motion of a body from all the data known at the beginning of each time step. In short, this means that you can simulate events that you’ve never seen before.

You can use NEi Explicit for solving problems involving transient explicit dynamics, material models, steady state heat transfers, and contact modeling. You can define contact conditions and monitor the motion of a model’s parts continuously. Your parts can contact and separate without restrictions on the size of the deformations or the rigid body rotations of the model. NEi Explicit’s large deformation formulation is accurate over the entire range of small to large deformations, and you can simulate and analyze such physical processes as shear and contact sliding with friction efficiently.

Many of NEi Explicit’s features are detailed in today’s Pick of the Week write-up, and the full range of its capabilities can be discovered using the accompanying links. I recommend that you click on the link to see some registration-free videos of NEi Explicit in action. This could be a game changer for you.